AAMI/FDA Home Healthcare Summit Convenes Next Month

Focusing on one of the biggest and most exciting trends in healthcare technology, the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have joined forces to host a summit next month focusing on home healthcare.
 
The AAMI/FDA Summit on Healthcare Technology in Nonclinical Settings, scheduled for Oct. 9-10 in Herndon, Va., will bring together a host of experts who will discuss the challenges associated with the use of healthcare technology in nonclinical settings, such as the home. With patients increasingly receiving care for chronic diseases at home, family members and other nonmedical professionals will need to learn how to manage the medical devices used to treat these conditions. What do they need to know? And what can medical device manufacturers, healthcare technology management professionals, information technology experts, design engineers, clinicians, regulators and others do to make this a successful and safe transition?

The summit, which will take place at the Hyatt near Washington, D.C.s Dulles International Airport, will pose these questions to representatives from the FDA, The Joint Commission (TJC), academia, industry, hospitals, and more, who will interact with audience members to develop potential solutions.

The movement of healthcare technology into homes and other nonclinical settings is changing fundamentally how we deliver healthcare in this country and abroad, says AAMI president Mary Logan. This change has the potential to save scarce healthcare resources and make patients more comfortable. But there are also dangers if we dont consider the different physical spaces in which medical devices will function and the unique needs and capabilities of users outside formal clinical care settings managed by highly trained experts. Thats what this summit is all aboutfinding solutions and setting us all on the right path forward.

Among the experts scheduled to speak is Tejal Gandhi, MD, president of the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF). She will be one of two keynote speakers who will help put the issues into perspective and set the stage for discussions. Gandhi took the reins at NPSF in July, after serving as chief quality and safety officer at Partners Healthcare in Boston.

 Joseph Cafazzo, PhD, lead at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation and senior director of Healthcare Human Factors at the University Health Network, also will present a keynote address. Cafazzo, who also is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, has conducted research into patients use of technology to treat diabetes, end-stage renal disease, and congestive heart failure.

The summit also will offer practical case studies from the field in a session led by Danielle Hoover, MD, patient safety physician at the VA National Center for Patient Safety. At the conclusion of the summit, the audience will set priorities and develop action plans in a facilitated session.

Healthcare regulators say they see great ideas potentially developing from the summit. The FDA is looking to see how the summit could influence any future policy decisions, says Mary Weick-Brady, a senior policy advisor with the FDAs Center for Devices and Radiological Health. She added that the summit will give the home healthcare community and other multidisciplinary stakeholders the opportunity to bring up subjects the agency might not have considered.

Next months event will mark the fifth time that AAMI and the FDA have collaborated on a summit. Previous summits have focused on infusion devices, clinical alarms, reprocessing, and medical device interoperability.

AAMI would like to thank the following organizations for supporting the summit: the American College of Clinical Engineering, Ambulatory Surgery Center Association, BSI, Center for Aging Services Technologies, Continua Health Alliance, ECRI Institute, eHealth Initiative, Healthcare Technology Foundation, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Infusion Nurses Society, TJC, Medical Device Innovation, Safety and Security Consortium, NPSF, UL (Underwriters Laboratories), and the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance.

For details about the summit, including how to register, visit: www.aami.org/summit2013/.
 
Source: Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI)